Police in Edinburg, Texas, received a phone call
Wednesday morning from an immigrant trapped inside a so-called "stash house." The caller
said that more than 100 people were locked inside and they had gone
days without food or water, the Monitor reported.

Police arrived to find windows sealed with bars and doors locked with chains and
padlocks in a rental home at the end of a dirt street.

“It was crazy,” said Lt. Oscar Treviño told the Monitor.

The two men who own the house have since been charged with conspiring to harbor illegal immigrants, the Associated Press reported.
Vicente Ortiz Soto and Marcial Salas Gardunio are accused of smuggling
the immigrants and then keeping 115 immigrants locked inside the stash
house. Salas told investigators that Ortiz paid him $500 per week to
smuggle immigrants.

"There was no way that they could leave because the doors were secured
with burglar bars and were locked from the outside," an Edinburg police
spokesman told BBC News.

Officers
had to use bolt cutters to free the prisoners. The immigrant witnesses
come from South and Central America, and told officers that they had
been driven to the stash house from the Rio Grande River, which marks
the border between Texas and Mexico.

The Monitor reported that
there has been a recent spike in stash house discoveries in the Rio
Grande Valley, and at least 1,000 illegal immigrants have been
apprehended since October.

More by Amy Silverstein

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